


Sleep Talker

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Illness and looming death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-25
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2019-09-29 04:57:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17196947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Sarah has been sick all winter, and David is doing all he can.





	Sleep Talker

It was the darkest, deepest part of the night, but Sarah Jacobs wasn’t sleeping. That meant that David wasn’t sleeping either, at least not entirely. Sarah was sitting up in bed, shaking with the deep, painful sounding coughs that had been her constant companion since the middle of December. David was lying on his side with his eyes closed, shaking himself out of a dream that had been very much like reality, in that it had been all about Sarah coughing. In fact, he was fairly certain that he’d dreamt four times in a row about being woken up by Sarah’s cough, and offering to get her a glass of water, only to have something strange happen to prove that he was not awake at all. 

Oh well. David tried to rouse himself. Maybe the fifth time would be a charm. With any luck this time around, even if he was still dreaming, everything would be sensible and Sarah’s face wouldn’t melt off or anything like that.

“Water…” David muttered against his pillow. Sarah didn’t answer. She continued to cough.

“Thiiiiirsty…” David added, a minute or two later. 

“You’re thirsty?” Sarah asked.

“No.” David said, more forcefully than the word warranted. He sat up abruptly, and ran a hand through his hair, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the shadows around him. Without waiting for Sarah to say anything, he got out of bed, put on his slippers, and plodded up to the stove, to warm up the kettle and fill a glass. David was not a morning person, nor was he really a middle of the night person either, and remembering where the cups were took him an inordinately long time, but he managed, and by the time that he’d made his way back to the bedroom he was feeling a little more alert. 

Sarah had put her pillow in front of her face, and was trying to use it to muffle her coughs. David took a seat on the edge of her bed, moving the pillow away carefully. 

“That won’t help you breathe,” he pointed out. 

“Don’t want to wake Mama.” 

David frowned, and handed the cup over to Sarah, who did her best to sip it. He didn’t want her to wake Mama either. He’d never seen his sister this sick before, and the amount of sleep he’d missed since the start of her illness was nothing compared to the amount his mother had lost in trying to care for her. Everybody was worried, and the things they needed in order to help Sarah were running low. There hadn’t even been any honey left in the house to mix into Sarah’s water to try and soothe her throat. They were buying her medicine now, but that meant no money to spend on all the little home remedies that seemed to help more than the strange pills the were giving her.

“How are you feeling?” David asked uselessly. 

“Better,” Sarah said, then hunched over to cough again, so that David had to help her hold onto her cup to keep her from spilling her drink. 

“You were talking in your sleep, you know,” Sarah said, once she’d caught her breath. 

“Was not.” 

“Yes you were. For an hour every time I coughed you told Les, very sternly, to stop playing baseball this instant.” 

“I wouldn’t say that, because Les doesn’t even know how to play baseball. If he wanted to learn, I’d support him in it.” 

“You also argued with the grim reaper for my life.” 

David frowned. He wanted to say that he wouldn’t have done that, because he didn’t believe in the grim reaper or anything else like that, but there was a note of seriousness in Sarah’s voice that made his heart pound faster. 

“Sorry,” David said quietly. 

Another coughing fit. 

“Don’t be,” Sarah managed to gasp out after a couple of minutes. “You were pretty eloquent. For somebody who was drooling into his pillow as he spoke, that is.” 

David didn’t answer for several minutes. He pushed Sarah’s hair away from her shoulders and forehead, so that it ran, flat and sweat-dampened, down her back. 

“I’m going to read to you,” David said at last. Sarah didn’t argue, so he lit one of the lamps in the room, and went over to the pile of books on their desk. He bypassed his own, even though normally he would have liked to have a captive audience, and picked up Jane Eyre, because he knew that Sarah liked that one best. 

David read until dawn broke, without even stopping to complain about the parts of the book that he thought were stupid, or the parts that he disagreed with. He simply kept his eyes on the book, and read, and tried to believe that it was helping somehow


End file.
